Hey all,
We are going to work on a beta release on the 1.7.x branch. The master is open again for changes for 1.8.x. There will be some work on the 1.7.x branch to fix bugs including bugs that are already reported but have not yet been addressed (like the regression against data-type detection for Sage). It would be great if 1.7.x gets as much testing as possible so that we can discover regressions that may have occurred. But, it was important to draw the line for 1.7.0 features.
Thanks for all the many hours of reviewing, coding, writing, reviewing and merging pull requests that has gone into this tag. Just perusing the commit history shows there have been dozens of people (including several new contributors) who have contributed to this release.
You are a very talented and productive group and it's time to start thinking about 1.8.x. I think the target should be around November or December.
Thanks,
-Travis